Reading Room Notes

Two letters in the Petrie Museum’s archives got me thinking about archaeological commutes. The letters in question were from Flinders Petrie to Amelia Edwards, dated September 1884 and September 1889. They were written not from a remote Egyptian site, but on the train in England - the first en route to London and the second en route to Dover.

The first letter was addressed from Bromley – the town in Kent where the then single Petrie had grown up with his parents William Petrie and Anne Flinders Petrie. Bromley was the terminus of a branch line of the South-Eastern Railway, connecting suburbs of Kent to the metropolis. By the mid 1880s trains ran regularly into London's West End as they still do today, and the first letter concludes:

“Now I have got up to Charing Cross, so good bye.”

At the time of writing the letter, Petrie’s exhibition of artefacts from San (Tanis) and Pithom was in its third week. It seems likely that on departing the train he made his way to Oxford Circus where the exhibition was open in the Royal Archaeological Institute’s rooms in Oxford Mansions.

In the second letter, Petrie was travelling to Dover, having finished most of his responsibilities in England. It’s clear that the train journey was anything but smooth that day – he begins “Here come spiders! How it jolts.” and signs off “Ever yours in shakes”.

Detail from Petrie's letter to Amelia Edwards, dated 28 September 1889. Courtesy of the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, UCL

While the jolting train makes Petrie's already challenging handwriting even more difficult to decipher, I love these little details in correspondence – sparkling glimpses into ordinary life reminding us that now-famous archaeologists were once real people too.

As luck would have it, recently Ashley Cooke, Liverpool Museum’s Senior Curator of Antiquities, discovered a collection of catalogues from Petrie’s early exhibitions in his office, and tweeted images of them. Among the catalogue cachet is a Hand List for Visitors to the Collection of antiquities Discovered in the Fayum, Egypt, by W. M. Flinders Petrie 1889 – the very exhibition that was starting its last week when Petrie took the train to Dover.

This is a real archive treasure - catalogues for Petrie’s 1880s displays are (as far as I know) incredibly rare. It might possibly be even more exciting to me as a historian of archaeology and archaeological exhibitions than hidden chambers in Tut’s tomb!

AcknowledgementsThanks to Alice Stevenson for permission to write about Petrie's letters (3/1/PEN/12 and 3/1/PEN/50) in the Petrie Museum archive, and publish a detail of 3/1/PEN/50 here, and to Ashley Cooke for putting the images of his catalogue discovery on Twitter!